Comments on: Google postal address sync - part three

By: Ted Wood

Ted Wood — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 05:21:25 +0000

Google’s contact sync XML is the more mind-boggling beast I’ve ever seen. I honestly don’t know why they can’t just get a straight-forward model in place. For example, the “Name” field comes through in the “title” field in a contact feed. What’s up with that? What about the existing Title field? I’m very unimpressed with Google’s effort on their contact sync feeds.

By: ZE

ZE — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 16:04:20 +0000

@anserk: “Recently I came across Google Contacts addon which does perform addresses sync.” https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/google-contacts/

@leni: do you have any comment on this addon? It seems to duplicate a subset of Zindus functionality (no offline sync).

By: ZE

ZE — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 15:34:50 +0000

They claim from July 29, 2011 to have fixed this:
“This has been fixed since Contacts API v3 and is also now available in GMail’s Contacts Manager.”
http://code.google.com/a/google.com/p/apps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=1002#c78

Is that the case? If that is not they case, you might post onto that bug with why.

By: gasp

gasp — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 04:31:45 +0000

Certainly looks like its there in gmails contacts manager so whats the news on the sync in Zindus? Can we have an ETA?

By: marcin

marcin — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 04:39:44 +0000

Any news when this gonna be updated?

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 20:33:49 +0000

Today, 2011-07-29
Comment 78 by project member ala…@google.com, Today (4 hours ago) Hello developers,

This has been fixed since Contacts API v3 and is also now available in GMail’s Contacts Manager.

Best,
Alain

Status: Fixed

By: leni

leni — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 23:48:13 +0000

@anserk - yep, if google doesn’t implement the feature they promised in 2011 then the zindus addon will implement something like that as a fallback.

By: Anserk

Anserk — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 22:19:20 +0000

Actually, I just played with it, enabled address conversion and everything works. Everything syncs perfectly between Gmail, Thunderbird and my iPhone. Can you possibly look at the source code of that addon if it’s available? I would still prefer Zindus, as I have more trust in it and I like the sync status etc.

By: Anserk

Anserk — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 21:47:16 +0000

I’ve been using Zindus for many years with no problems. However, the lack of addresses sync is still a bit of inconvenience. Recently I came across Google Contacts addon which does perform addresses sync. It doesn’t separate out addresses structure, putting them all on address line with commas, like 123 Main St,City,State,ZIP. Can Zindus be modified to do something like that?

By: msherman

msherman — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 13:20:35 +0000

No, my comments are based on observed behaviour of manually editing the plaintext multiline address field in the gmail web ui, and then observing how each line is synchronized into the discrete fields in the iPhone interface.

But in pseudocode, it should be as simple as (optionally?) replacing the code where you currently generate the XML which you put in the plaintext multiline address field with:

formattedAddress = street1 + ‘\n’ + street2 + ‘\n’ city + ‘\n’ + province + ‘\n’ + postal + ‘\n’ + country;

and the reverse parsing code with:

addressLines = split(formattedAddress, ‘\n’);
street1 = addressLines [0];
if(addressLines.size >= 6) {
streets = 2;
street2 = addressLines[1];
} else {
streets = 1;
street2 = “”;
}
city = addressLines[streets+0];
province = addressLines[streets+1];
postal = addressLines[streets+2];
country = addressLines[streets+3];